Voice Search For Google Maps Goes Live

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Google’s push into voice search is no secret: it’s baked into most builds of Android, and Chrome users have been enjoying the search-by-voice feature since July. It wasn’t so much a question of if Google would keep running with it, but where and when would it pop up next.

The process is as straightforward as ever: click the microphone icon that now appears in the Google Maps search box and get busy talking. After a bit of testing, accuracy doesn’t appear to be an issue save for a few really dicey names. “Uttar Pradesh” took a few tries, but I can chalk that up to how poorly I tend to enunciate.

While it scores points for verbal accuracy, some Google’s directions are a little flaky. The Lat Long Blog mentions, for example, that you can simply say “directions from Place X to Place Y,” but I couldn’t for the life of me get the place names to pop up in the correctly in the To and From boxes. It took eight tries until I discovered that using the word “directions” in the query like Google suggests really throws everything off.

Tiny oversights like that aside, voice search for Google Maps is generally a blast to use. All you Chrome lovers can feel free to take it for a spin (and report your findings), but everyone else will just have to do it the old-fashioned way.